Rubrics Were Meant To Be Broken

‼️NOTE: THIS FILM IS UNFINISHED AND DOES NOT REFLECT MY STANDARD OF QUALITY NOW, NOR DOES ITS SHITTY PRODUCTION REPRESENT MY PRODUCTION PROCEDURES NOW. I JUST WANTED TO POST IT FOR SHITS N GIGS. & IN CASE ANYONE ENJOYS IT. THANK YOU‼️


this was my final for CTM 325: Comedy Writing.

here's the logline: a freshman film student, VONTAE, asks his upperclassman roommate, JAYSON for help with his final. they break every rule in the rubric in the process.

this film was written over the course of a few months, from september 2023, to december 2023 and was shot in four days in december 2023. it was the 3rd narrative short i directed and wrote by myself, and to this day is unfinished. this is the cut i submitted for the final grade. i wanted to dedicate more time to this, but i was taking 4 other classes at the time and shooting another narrative short i honestly gave more of a shit about at the time (should be releasing later this fall). that's not to say i didn't and don't care about this project now, i truthfully had a lot of fun writing the script. a lot of the inspiration coming from the realistic dialog + surrealistic situations of shows like Home Movies or Regular Show. i only took this class because advanced scriptwriting was full, but i dont regret it. i wanna try my hand at a comedy again in the future i think.

visually, i took inspiration from the french experimental sci-fi film "La Jetee". that film tells it's stories through a series of stills put together. so i took that, and a bit of Captain Underpants Flip-O-Rama's and created the visual style of this film because i thought it'd look goofy. i think it helped the few moments that were video land harder too. most of the cast and crew agreed the funniest part was when Shavon (Vontae) did his lil victory dance and Ian (Jayson) told him to stop lul. how we pulled this off is we filmed every shot once, and then took a series of stills afterward based on the video. i edited the audio from the video to the stills to create the film as is. if i could do it all over again, i would have the leads rehearse the scene and take the stills. then later, have them VO the whole film, kinda like an animated film. one of my professor's notes was to do that. the main reason i still shot video was in case this whole still photos being put together thing didn't work. i wanted a contingency. can't say i'm too mad at past me though. wouldn't know it was waste of time if i aint waste it in the first place, yk?

the "crew" was really just myself, and my friend at the time, harley, who operated cam b and AD'd. i was unfamiliar with the cam used, the BlackMagic Ursa Mini, and had to console the lead actor, Shavon, on how to use it many, many times. in hindsight I'm sure it was an annoying and frustrating experience for Shavon and his co-star, Ian as everything took a lot longer than it needed due to our crew size. that's probably part of the reason i couldn't get either one of them to return for ADR lmao. oh yeah, i rented equipment from the university for this one and the mic they gave me didn't have an XLR cable included. so all of the audio was recorded on my 30$ RODE VideoMic Go. i bet you couldn't even tell ;).

but yeah, i didn't upload this one until now because i wanted to wait until it was finished to do so, but tbh i dont think it ever will be. i dont talk with harley anymore, nor do i with malakai (the actor who plays the frat boy in the film who also let me borrow his cam for the stills in this film, thanks kai), so it'd feel weird revisiting it. neither of the leads could work out a time to ADR, and i've just moved onto another project.

still, it's better to give this unfinished creature a chance to breathe fresh air outside of my harddrive.

so here it is, Rubrics Were Meant To Be Broken, in a way, shape, and form. thank you to all the cast and crew who dedicated their time to help put this together. both so i could see the script i actually enjoyed come to life, and so i didn't have to take another class with professor blevins lol. enjoy !! new short, "roadblock" coming later this year.